Digital Marketing encompasses a variety of strategies that can help your business build its brand awareness and ultimately increase those all-important sales by delivering a form of advertisement through a digital medium. It typically includes; SEO, Social Media, Paid Advertising and of course Email Marketing.
As specialists in Digital Marketing we recognise that a good digital marketing strategy will incorporate all of the above to formulate a powerful online presence. However, it is apparent that a large number of businesses fail to utilise them all and often we see that email marketing gets left behind like the ugly duckling. Here we explore why your business should be recognising why emailing marketing is an absolute must.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing allows your business to deliver marketing campaigns whether this is in the form of text, image, video etc. into a consumer email inbox. It’s typically used to promote special offers, share company news, provide value/ advice and much more.
Unfortunately, email marketing often provokes fears of being “spammy” and putting your audience off. Well yes, if you’re emailing them every two minutes of the day, we’d bet our bottom dollar that you’d be right. However, if you have a carefully thought out and effective email strategy in place this won’t be the case.
Still not convinced… here are 7 reasons why email marketing is so important within digital strategy.
You own the email list
As long as you have collected the email address data according to the GDPR rules that exist here in the UK, then those email addresses are yours to use. This is a huge benefit when it comes to email marketing that many people often overlook.
Let’s just do a quick comparison to social media. Your Instagram account might have over 5k followers and this is absolutely great…. but those followers aren’t yours, Instagram could shut down your account at any time and those followers would literally disappear into thin air. Email marketing on the other hand allows you to collate a document of email addresses that you can transfer to whichever email marketing software you wish to use. As long as you keep those email addresses safe and secure then you will always have a tangible outreach to your prospective and existing customers in your email database.
Easily accessible
Let’s be honest the majority of us have email accounts that we access multiple times throughout the day. Especially with thanks to mobile devices it’s not uncommon to be checking emails whilst we eat our morning cereal, commute to the office or even relax on the sofa of an evening, why… because they are right there. Your email can get into the hands of your customer/ prospective customer with great ease. So, if you’re not jumping into their inbox then you really are missing a trick to nurture that relationship with them.
Helps build a relationship
If your emails contain great value and information, then they are more likely to be well received and read as opposed to a consistent stream of emails that only focus on the sell, sell, sell. You should use your email marketing strategy as a way of introducing your business to your customers and taking them on a journey with you. Including a video in your email can be a fantastic way of helping your customers really get to know you and your business. Remember, people are much more likely to purchase from those that they feel they know, like and trust.
Increases brand awareness
Not so long ago, your business would need to make 7 touch points before someone would consider purchasing/investing with you. That’s now increased to a whopping 20. Email marketing is a great opportunity to increase your brand awareness, deliver valuable content and raise awareness of your brand. Again, we’re not advocating that this is done on a daily basis, it has to be a frequency that suits you and what your business has to offer, however a weekly or a fortnightly email can do wonders for this.
Facilitates targeting/ segmentation
Email marketing allows for some nifty segmentation for those businesses that perhaps have a diverse target consumer base or broad service/ product offering. For example, a retail store that sells both men’s and women’s shoes might want to have a different email going out to each gender. Yes, of course there are going to be exceptions where a female might buy for a male but in general an email campaign sent to a woman including all female shoes will have a higher conversion rate than if that email was sent to them and included both female and male shoes.
Here’s another example of segmentation, if someone has expressed an interest in a specific service that your business offers then you might add them to that email list and only send them content related to that.
Remember, it’s all about the relevancy of the content.
Personalisation
When adding contacts to your email database you can often input their date of birth. This holds another opportunity for you to contact your prospective customer when that day comes around. You can make them feel special by offering them a Birthday discount or Birthday surprise.
In addition to this even if you are bulk sending a campaign you can personalise the emails so that it includes the correct name and other key variables about them that you have collected and input into your email marketing programme.
Personalisation can be a great technique in helping consumers believe that this contact was really made for them and you are a match made in heaven.
Measurable
In any business your ROI (return on investment) is always a crucial factor to consider. You want to know which marketing activities are resulting in sales, so you can adjust your marketing plan accordingly, get the most for your money and also use the strategy that is proving to be most effective for you.
Email marketing when set up properly can provide you with some great insights. You can see how many people have opened your email, how many have clicked through to your website and even how many sales can be attributed to each email marketing campaign. There are not many other marketing strategies out there that can provide you with such detailed information.
We hope that after reading this you can really see the importance that email marketing should hold within your digital strategy and we hope that you’ll start implementing your own very soon. However, if you’re feeling overwhelmed or short of time to do this yourself, our team of email marketing experts are on hand to help.